Sir Anthony Quayle, 76; Actor Won Distinction in Theater, Film, TV (2024)

Sir Anthony Quayle, who in a career that reached through six decades earned a reputation as one of the English-speaking world’s most distinguished actors, died Friday at his home in London.

Quayle, who was 76, had been suffering from cancer for several weeks, his agent, Laurence Evans, told the Associated Press.

An authoritative, forceful character on stage and in television and films, the burly actor was credited with bringing Stratford-on-Avon (the Royal Shakespeare Company) into the forefront of British theater, encouraging such dramatic giants as Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud to work there for minimum compensation.

Although attracted to acting as a youth as an escape from a middle-class existence that he once described as “being shut in a box,” he was in the theater nearly 40 years before reaching star status with “Sleuth” in 1970.

His performances in London and New York as a middle-aged detective-story writer seeking revenge on his wife’s young lover were lauded by Clive Barnes as “pleasantly grim, slightly paranoid.”

The play won a Tony award, a prize Quayle himself had quietly won in 1956 with his performance as the bloody Oriental tyrant in Christopher Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine the Great.”

Although “Tamburlaine” was an artistic triumph, it failed to make a star of Quayle, who continued to be forced “to do all sorts of crap,” as he referred to his film and TV assignments.

Not all of it was “crap,” despite his modest protestations.

His better-known, widely heralded film portrayals included characters in Alfred Hitchco*ck’s “The Wrong Man,” “The Guns of Navarone,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” “The Eagle Has Landed” and “Anne of a Thousand Days,” which brought him an Academy Award nomination for his role as Cardinal Wolsey.

On TV, he won an Emmy in 1974 as best supporting actor in a dramatic special for “QB VII, Parts 1 and 2.” He also appeared in the miniseries “Masada.”

John Anthony Quayle came from a family of druggists in Lancashire and until his teens had thought that he would enter the family business.

But a lack of interest in chemistry and physics coupled with a fascination he found in the “pretty girls” in the theater sent him to the stage.

He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts for a year and then got a job as straight man to a comedian. He made his first appearance on the London stage in 1931, and was a stalwart of the Old Vic company for several seasons, making his American debut in 1936 in “The Country Wife,” which starred Ruth Gordon.

He first became a director in 1946 in a London production of “Crime and Punishment,” starring Gielgud, Peter Ustinov and Edith Evans.

He became director of the Stratford theater in 1948, appearing that first season as Petruchio in “The Taming of the Shrew.” He played Falstaff in both parts of “Henry IV” in 1951 and was in “The Merry Wives of Windsor” in 1955. He also recruited such young actors as Richard Burton and Laurence Harvey.

Referring to his ability to attract such established stars as Olivier, Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, he said, “You have to set an example--a merry example, I hope.”

Yet as a manager or director, Quayle admitted, he sometimes believed that he had been “pouring creativity into others at the expense of my own,” he told the newspaper The Independent earlier this year.

“Sleuth” became his first taste of box-office success.

Other Broadway appearances included roles in Bertolt Brecht’s “Galileo,” Ustinov’s “Up the Tree” in 1967, and “Tamburlaine,” a role in which Quayle “combined a chilling and almost lunatic savagery with a kind of barbaric splendor,” critic Wolcott Gibbs said.

During World War II, Quayle had served in the Royal Artillery and then gave up a desk job in Gibraltar to help organize partisan guerrilla forces behind German lines in Albania.

“If life doesn’t have that little bit of danger about it, you’d better create it. If life hands you that danger, accept it gratefully,” he once told an interviewer.

He met such wartime giants as Winston Churchill, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Charles de Gaulle and afterward wrote of those adventures in two books, “Eight Hours From England” and “On Such a Night.”

In 1985, Quayle joined the distinguished company of actor-knights that has included Olivier, Alec Guinness, Gielgud, Richardson, John Mills and, most recently, Rex Harrison.

Morton Gottlieb, one of the producers of “Sleuth,” which ran for 1,222 performances in New York, recalled Quayle as “a wonderful actor.”

“There are some actors who have a certain personality and no matter what the role is, that personality takes over the stage,” Gottlieb said. “But Tony Quayle would fit into whatever the role and characterization was rather than imposing a certain persona on the play and the audience. Sometimes with big stars that doesn’t happen.”

He is survived by his second wife, Dorothy, an American actress he married in 1947, two daughters and a son. His first marriage ended in divorce.